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Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

It's amazing how much better Spotify is at finding related music I also like. Pandora, Google Play, that thing in iTunes -- all annoying. The other ones find bands that sound like bands I like but are annoying. Spotify actually finds me stuff I'm glad to have discovered. The other ones just find annoying doppelgangers of my favorite music.

(To be fair, Pandora is better than the others, but dependent on genre. It does really well with classical music. With lots of electronica/electronica related music -- very annoying.)

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I found Rdio to be the best of all possible options. It still is disappointing to me that 1) Apple didn't buy Rdio and 2) Pandora still has done nothing with the IP they got out of the deal.

Rdio had some really creative curation features. The "What's Hot" feature, which was a current hits list of what your friends like and are listening to was really amazing.

Their auto-play radio feature (it would start playing similar music based on what you just finished listening to) was great.

And lastly their "adventurous" slider, which allowed the radio station song search to land somewhere in the spectrum of just songs in your collection to new stuff you didn't have but was in some way related to the current radio station being played....man.....this feature alone was worth the whole subscription in my opinion.

Interesting. I switched from Spotify to Apple Music. The "For You" section with curated playlists were way better than the Spotify playlists IMO. I only wish that I could choose an activity (workout, etc.) and/or mood and a genre and I'd be all set.

There could be some genre specificity at play here. I like certain stuff that's influenced by Deep House, but find a lot of things that are "cool" in House music to be highly annoying. I'm a fan of British Isles traditional music, but find I already know most of the good stuff. I like certain contemporary French songwriters, but find most of them kinda samey.

The Spotify equivalent of "For You" is where I'm having the most luck. Maybe I'll give Apple another go.

Are you talking of DW or the more generic similar artists/discover tab then? Because the former is far better than the latter.

Funnily enough, it has recommended a lot of British Isles trad/folk to me, (and also Québécois, for some reason) most of which is OK but some of which is really interesting. It's found several long medieval ballads, which I would have thought was far too niche to recommend.

DW is most fruitful. If you are into British Isles trad/folk, there's a lot of wonderful Québécois stuff. Those guys often have better Irish trad chops than local Irish trad prodigies. Then on top of that, add in all the odd Acadian/french influence. I got to play with some of those guys in Christmas Revels.

Actually they do have playlists for activities and such - go to New, then scroll down to Activity Playlists.

This was my experience as well, I found a couple of really good playlists on Spotify but most are crap.

For me, I find Spotify better at finding & playing known music, but Pandora is better at finding similar music on a discovery basis. Maybe I just don't get the Spotify clients options for discovering music - everytime I go to discover new music there, other than broad genres or single-specific artists - it seems I hit limited options or dead ends.

I would agree with that actually, Spotify is great if you already know what what you want to hear. Pandora is great if you want to find new music.

I can't think of anything that Apple Music is great for, which is not very Apple-like.

I find the "Discover Weekly" playlists to be very good at this.

Discover weekly is ok, but I can only assume is processed vs your entire library at best. What I would love from Spotify is playlist button that said play this list and related music.

I think that Google Play is a little bit better than Spotify at finding related music I also like. Spotify's related bands list was a little better than Google's, but Google's radio-style playlists that you can create off of a song, a playlist, or just "I'm feeling lucky" are awesome almost every time. I used Spotify for longer but I feel like I'm getting a lot more value out of Google Play.

Obviously there's a lot of personal preference here. Add in that Google has a TON of info on me, way more than Spotify could ever have, and it's almost not a fair comparison. I should mention that I left Spotify because they have a 10,000-songs limit on how many songs you can save, even with a paid account, and that was absolutely absurd to me- IIRC, Google lets you actually upload more tracks than Spotify would let you save.

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